front of his home crowd) but it eased as
qualifying unfolded.
Jenson Button continued his Brazil
tradition (he hasn’t qualified top ten at
Interlagos since 2005!) and Michael nudged
Nico out of a slot in Q3. Otherwise, it was
the usual suspects – “usual” including a
Williams team that (in the case of Rubens
Barrichello) has made Q3 now on six
successive occasions.
It was wet off-line, as I say, but there’s
no doubt that there was a dry groove
there, ready to be exploited. If this had
been Free Practice Three rather than Q3,
you can imagine that Nico’s pole-winning
lap of 1min 14.470sec would have quickly
dissolved into a 13.5 and then a 13.0 – and
so on. Everyone was on options as the
chequered flag waved – and the track was
getting faster by the second, even if a few
light drops were again beginning to fall.
This was Q3, however: and whilst for
some drivers in Championship contention
(Alonso, Webber, Vettel, Hamilton) there
was reason to leave perhaps a 10 percent
margin over that car’s width of dry-
road ribbon, for others – Kubica, Massa,
Barrichello, Schumacher, Petrov – there was
little to lose and everything to gain.
The bizarre thing is that only Nico
Hulkenberg actually gained, faced up to
the big point and played it to perfection.
For this, he not only deserved the pole
but also some sort of ‘Lap of the Year’
award; it was a stunning piece of driving
born of total confidence and perfect use
both of grip levels and of the heat cycle of
the tyres.
Big plaudits, too, to the AT&T Williams
team, for enabling Nico to maximize those
closing minutes.
If we take Q3 as a whole, the pattern
was clear: start on intermediates and then
switch to option (slicks) for the final run.
And if we take, say, Fernando Alonso as a
benchmark, his runs went as follows: two
flying laps on intermediates and then in.
Fastest lap so far: 1min 17.471sec.
Nico Hulkenberg mirrored that: two laps
on inters, the faster of which was a 1min
17.604sec – 0.2 sec slower than Fernando’s
– and then in for a switch to slicks. Nothing
particularly unusual there, although Nico
was clearly gaining confidence at this point:
Rubens Barrichello, who excels in these
conditions, managed only a 1min 18.349sec
on inters.
Now out on pre-heated options, Nico’s
first flying lap, with the tyres perhaps not
quite up to temperature, was a 1min 16.737
– a massive 0.8 sec quicker than anyone
else on the circuit. This was impressive not
only because of its intrinsic pace but also
because it gave him the space he needed
to record two more flying laps – something
that only Hamilton and Alonso achieved.
Nico’s next lap was a 1min 15.462 – good
enough for the pole. By comparison, Vettel
at this point lapped in 1min 15.519, Kubica
in 1min 16.552sec , Alonso in 1min 15.589,
Webber in 1min 15.637, Barrichello in 1min
16.203sec ,Hamilton in 1min 16.274sec,
and Michael in 1min 16.925sec. No-one, in
other words (apart from Petrov, who was
out there in the 1min 19s, not wanting to
hit another wall) actually had a bad lap,
as in making a huge mistake or ‘finding
traffic’. Everyone was out there, sensing the
grip – and no-one was doing it better than
Nicolas Hulkenberg, aged 23 years and 79
days.
I suspect that Seb-V would want Fernando to win
the title if he, Seb, can’t do it on points ...